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Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović (b. November 30, 1946) is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Arguably the most famous performance artist working today, her work explores the aesthetic body as well as limits of the body, extreme endurance, the relationship between performer and audience, and the possibilities of the mind. Employing duration, pain, danger, exhaustion, and viewer participation, she works at extremes as she increasingly complicates the relationship between art and audience.

Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". Some critics have questioned the possibility and desirability of the very term central to Abramović’s practice: presence. As much as she may emphasize live performance, Abramović’s work is inescapably tied to her status as a media star whose viral image spreads in the absence of her physical presence. There is also something quasi-religious about Abramović’s performance persona, with her rituals of self-sacrifice (as in the flagellation and mock crucifixion in Lips of Thomas) that recall older traditions of asceticism and saintly devotion. All this can appear paradoxical in the relentlessly modern, mediated, and secular art world. But perhaps these contradictions are precisely what give Abramović’s work its power. A silent gaze, the taut stillness of direct contact—such tranquility, it turns out, is but the flip side of the entertainment spectacle that Abramović both conjures and thwarts. “If art comes just from art, it loses its power and becomes decorative,” Abramović warns. “I never create art to be decorative.”

Abramović exhibited at Documenta in 1977, 1982, and 1992 and at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1997, when she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Artist. She received the prize for her video installation and performance Balkan Baroque (1997), in which she hand-washed 1,500 cattle bones. Between 1976 and 1988, Abramović collaborated with German photographer and performance artist Ulay, who was also her romantic partner at the time, to create performances that undermined traditional gender binaries. In the years since, Abramović has worked independently, staging performances that increasingly demand viewer involvement. In her famous 2010 MoMA retrospective “The Artist Is Present,” visitors sat across from Abramović in silent communion.

In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.

Watch this video for a description of the work ‘Unconditional Love - Triptych (2023)’ in the artists own words - https://www.instagram.com/reel/C02EajVIA7k/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==